Column Entered Anti-SBC Publicity War

Admittedly, telephone regulation issues can be complicated and beg for simplification. But not the kind of simplification columnist Michael Hiltzik provided (“SBC, It’s All in the Way You Look at It,” June 23).

For example, California’s 1989 New Regulatory Framework for telephone companies was the first of its kind, starting a form of oversight that has been copied by most states. It directly limits phone company prices while requiring quality service, all in ways that insulate customers from the financial effects of competition.

Indeed, even if second wires from some competitors haven’t reached many homes (as they have most businesses), Hiltzik might have at least noticed the wireless phones that half the population now carries. Cable TV companies (such as Cox Communications Inc.) also offer high-speed Internet and telephone service. You don’t need SBC Communications Inc. or Verizon Communications to be connected anymore.

Service quality is as PUC Commissioners Michael R. Peevey and Susan P. Kennedy describe: not perfect, but good and in many cases outstanding.

The draft PUC staff report to the contrary is confused and selective, and seems determined to fault the phone companies regardless of the evidence.

For the average consumer, the quality and price of phone service is nowhere on the radar screen compared with real, pocketbook concerns. That’s not true for the industry itself, which has been involved in fraternal struggles for government-granted advantages since the 1996 Telecommunications Act tried to regulate and deregulate telecommunications simultaneously.

Hiltzik’s column, favoring as it does the anti-SBC set of industry combatants, might thus be viewed as one more skirmish in that publicity and public policy war.

G. Mitchell Wilk

Former commissioner, and president, California Public Utilities Commission

Tiburon, Calif.